SXSW Liveblog — Day 5

The rock star cliché for a band headed to South by Southwest is a handful of gnarly dudes piling into a beater van and setting the GPS for Austin, Texas. But for New York singer/songwriter Laura Stevenson and the four guys in her indie-folk band, the reality is less fart jokes and drug-addled misadventure and more baked goods and early mornings.

We’ve been documenting their tour to SXSW this year – watch the first installment here! – and in the midst of all the shows and driving, Laura played us this acoustic version of her song, “The Move,” from the upcoming album, Wheel, due out on April 23rd.

Sennheiser and Paste have taken over a house a couple of blocks from the convention center here in Austin. They’re conducting interviews with musicians, actors and filmmakers like Alex Winter, Amanda Palmer and Fred Armisen. The room where they’re doing the Q&As is pretty small, so they’re pumping the audio through all of these wireless Sennheiser RS 120 headphones. Grab a pair, grab a beer and listen in from anywhere on the property, sort of like a silent disco.

Leap Motion has a room full of mesmerized attendees wagging their fingers at computer screens—the ten-finger-trackable motion controller demonstration shows millimeter-accurate capabilities and highly impressive smoothness. This thing may kill touchscreens before they make their promised way to all our devices.

“South By Southwest is the weirdest place for me to go of all places – the only place in the world that I’ve ever been where people come up to me. I’ll be walking around with Ashton and they come up to me. It’s like reversed roles. Anywhere else in America we’d be walking around and Ashton would have, like, a mob of people around him.”

Katie Graham and Andrew Matthews directed Zero Charisma, a love letter to Dungeons & Dragons and gaming culture that we’re very excited about seeing tomorrow. They’re also very nice, unless you make a dumb D&D joke.

Me: (by way of pointing out how sluggish and dumb I am this morning): I need to make a dexterity check for my brain.

Kim Dotcom’s Floating Head Speaks to SXSW via Skype

In one of the more surreal discussions at SXSW, Kim Dotcom, the notorious founder of Megaupload, spoke to an audience via Skype on Monday afternoon, appearing in front of an all-black background and in all-black clothes that gave him the floating-head quality of a Great and Powerful Oz.

On the panel moderated by Wired contributor Charles Graeber, who visited Dotcom after an early morning raid by the New Zealand government in January 2012, Dotcom spoke candidly about his predicament. Currently banned from leaving New Zealand and awaiting extradition to the United States over criminal copyright infringement related to Megaupload, the German national sees himself as a target of U.S. political repression rather than an online racketeer, and vowed that regardless of what happens next, “I will never be in a prison in the U.S. I can guarantee you that.”

What Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Movie About Porn Addiction is Really About

Joseph Gordon-Levitt made a movie about porn addiction. It’s sweet, funny, deeply emotional, and ultimately not really about porn at all. Instead, Gordon-Levitt’s movie is about the ways people create distance and engage superficially with the relationships in their lives — whether with lovers, religion or PornHub – without ever really connecting.

“I wanted to tell a story about how people objectify each other and how media often contributes to that, especially when it comes to love and sex,” Gordon-Levitt said of Don Jon, which he wrote, directed and starred in. “We learn a lot of expectations from movies, or TV shows, or commercials, or magazines, or pornography, and those expectations are unrealistic and maybe not so healthy. And if we’re busy comparing our own lives and our partners to those expectations, we’re doomed.”

How to Make the World’s Longest Chain of Barrel Monkeys

When software engineer (and former captain of the Dartmouth Hacker Club) Parker Phinney was a 8th grade math student in New Hampshire almost a decade ago, he calculated that 10,000 of those little plastic barrel monkeys, linked little plastic arm to little plastic arm, would stretch to a height of 200 stories. Now 23, he recently turned the thought exercise into a reality last year, and broke the Guinness World Record for the longest chain of barrel monkeys.

Even when he was a middle school student, however, Phinney realized there would be logistical difficulties. How could you create a 200-story chain, especially when the tallest building in the world at the time was only 163 stories? He calculated that those little plastic arms at most could support a chain about 8 stories. But where to find something that tall, and out of the wind?

“Eight stories is tall, and you can’t have these continuous vertical spaces inside of buildings,” Phinney told the audience of his SXSW panel. He started to look at more exotic buildings, like lighthouses and missile silos as possible record setting venues. But then there was high school, and college, and Phinney kinda gave up.

Finally, as a senior in college, he decided to give the monkey record another try and contacted Guinness for a shot at the record. The rules were simple. Monkey chain was to be vertical, no adhesive allowed, and linked arm to arm. “I filled the heck out of that Guinness form,” Phinney says. “And sent it off.”

After a conversation from Phinney about the physical limits of monkey chain building, Guinness actually changed the rules; now the monkeys could be “connected in a garland fashion.” In other words, it didn’t have to be a single vertical chain.

On May 13, 2012, in a New Hampshire auditorium it happened. Using a clothesline spooled out in a continuous zigzag, 25 volunteers, two hours and 5,000 plastic monkeys, Phinney triumphed.

“We freakin’ did it,” Phinney says. “For a long time this story’s ending sucked. I had kinda given up for 8 years. The point is, we all have our someday, maybe projects. So even if you’ve kinda given up, finish your story.”

Stephen Wolfram on the Wolfram Language, the Cloud and Facebook

Stephen Wolfram is likely much smarter than you, but that’s okay because he’s spent the better part of two decades building tools that help people acquire and understand complex information in just about any scientific field. At Wolfram’s presentation at SXSW on Monday, he showed off the possibilities of his programming language — appropriately named the Wolfram language – and revealed his plans for expanding into the cloud.

Pulling from the trillions of pieces of data and thousands of algorithms collected over the years in Mathematica, a computational software tool created by Wolfram (and the foundation of his online answer engine, Wolfram Alpha), the Wolfram language can try to predict the line of code a user will want to use next.

For example, Wolfram displayed a simple sine function through a single line of code in the user interface and then typed “create a red frame.” Instantly, the sine function was given a red border.

Wolfram is also working on an augmented reality version of Wolfram Alpha, which he says will become better at anticipating the questions of users, and plans to add Mathematica to the cloud and make it more accessible via mobile devices.

Although Wolfram has made a career out of collecting data, he noted that millions of regular people have started tracking their own data as well, namely through Facebook. Wolfram Alpha can use the information on someone’s Facebook account to create a dynamic report of their life, displaying the various connections users have with friends and how their content has been uploaded over time. Try it now.